When it comes to gaming, game devs/publishers have, for the most part, brought that on themselves by way of skimping on quality and/or content.

Back in the day, it used to be so that no self-respecting dev/publisher would even think about releasing a full-priced game (i.e. $49.99 USD or more at the time) if it offered less than 30 hours of substantial (i.e. non-repetitive, non-grinding) gameplay. And the reason why they wouldn't have tried to skimp back then is because they knew that if they did, then their game would have (rightfully) flopped, since back then, consumers wouldn't stand for that kind of crap (unlike in our modern times, in which they do).

Nowadays, in contrast, huge publishers/devs have no hesitation at all about releasing games that cost $59.99 - $99.99+ USD games which have 4-6 hours of gameplay, or if the consumer is "very lucky," they might max out at 15 hours worth of game for that price, which is now inexplicably considered to be a "long" game by the industry shill "professional" reviewers (which pretty much all of them are shills IMO).

Or, in the few times when modern full-priced games are 30 hours or longer, that's usually only because they are filled to overflowing with endless grinding of the same few copy & pasted tasks within the game few copy & pasted environments, over and over again ad infinitum and ad nauseam, and often accompanied by "microstransactions" where the consumer is expected to shell out even more cash in order to unlock in-game tools by which to bypass the boring & aggravating grind.

So then, seeing as devs/publishers started skimping on game content and quality and also resorting to shady tactics, that makes it totally fair game for consumers to be very reluctant and/or unwilling to pay full price for their new games under those conditions.

Well as you can see in this very thread, we have people around here who think the MSRPs for games at release are in general (quote): "fake and over-inflated scams".

And while I definitely don't agree with that sentiment, I also don't print money on my own...therefore I'm buying games at a discount whenever possible.

And lately that's definitely more often the case, than it has been just a few years prior.

And it also has gotten easier and easier over the years to do so, simply because today everybody and their auntie knows for a fact, that the next sale is just around the corner.

Remember, when GOG's very own managing director Guillaume Rambourg and head of marketing Trevor Longino explained ten years ago, that
(quote): "...regular 80 per cent discounts send a negative message to the consumer about what the games are worth.
"Of course, you make thousands and thousands of sales of a game when it's that cheap, but you're damaging the long-term value of your brand because people will just wait for the next insane sale" (end of quote)?

Well, times have truly changed, huh?!

In that sense, the industry works just as intended.

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Just yesterday, we saw the release of the "Atari 50: the anniversary celebration".
And someone in the release thread claimed Atari would have been responsible for the video game crash of 1983.

That's not (entirely) true, of course.

The reasons for the crash were:
- an overabundance of games (and too many different gaming systems),
- games gotten cheaper and cheaper (because: in an oversaturated market, you need to be cheaper than your competitors)
- many of those (cheap) games were of bad quality (because offering something for cheap means you have to save money somewhere).

Sounds somehow familiar?

We get swamped by games nowadays.

Many of these games are nowhere near the quality that many of us grew up with, when they get released.

But that's ok. They don't have to be, because you can patch 'em after release, right ?

And if a game doesn't sell well enough (meaning: it doesn't make the devs/pubs enough money, despite the two dozen "80% off" sales they participated in the first six months after release, they simply save the time and (paid!) work to patch it...who care's anyway? The customers are used to it by now.

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A few years ago, Kickstarter was a pretty big thing in the gaming community, wouldn't you agree?
I alone backed maybe a dozen games.
Mostly (but not entirely) on tiers that would grant me some analogue goodies.

But here's the thing: when it came to the games alone - in general, they would be made available to the general public for cheaper (and (fully) patched, of course), often almost instantly after release.

So, if we leave out the goodies - other people had to pay (much) less than I did...to get the same (or better) product - often shortly after release.

Heck, sometimes my DRM-free release (aka: my default go-to option) took longer for me to receive, than it took for the DRM-ed release to get available for everybody else.

That's why I stopped backing games on KS.
If an idea is good enough to be backed, it will get backed, without my money.
And if it gets released after two to three years "in the making" - I can still buy it.
But now at a discount, and in a (more or less) bug-free state.

That's also why I (usually) don't buy newly released games on day one, anymore.

"A burnt child fears the fire", as we in Germany say.

Not in that sense, I don't catch every giveaway, even though I tend to hoard, it's not indiscriminate, especially when you pay with (unwanted) newsletter subscription. If something could interest me and it's very cheap or free, I speed up and grap ^_^

Too much games ended up catching dust in my account this way, I admit. Still, I consider unfair to see a game often at high discount or free (recently: Martial Law, Crime Cities, Patrician, Divine Divinity, Soulbringer, even the nostalgia gem that is Outcast, which has probably compatibility issue since is pure voxel software rendered) and be too nitpicky about it (come on, you've obtained it for the price of five biscuits and a coffee!)

I suspect that in that case the scarcity is not of effort or money (and not out of spite fof being underpaid) but time.
Time before planned, hurried release on time to match some hobby "season" or anniversary or industry fair, etc.
So the only way to get both the objectives is finish the core parts and promise the additional ones to flesh out your setting later (for free or almost, if you're fair to the customer). It does not work out well everytime.
But on the other hand in ye olde goode times we had ten(!) characters in a fighting game, five big stages in a , or more stages that were just variants, expansions (i.e. season packs/DLCs) that were more of the same ("the lost levels", "christmas themed", "same but faster&harder!") . These games were made by very small, dedicated teams, so there was passion but also no "hollywood" production levels to fund via worldwide sales and small studios sometimes failed and closed nonetheless, etc.
Modern conveniences spoiled us, especially coupled with equally modern (and sometimes absurd) scarcities. Nobody complained about those huge pricings back then, not as I knew. They were happily paying games "in gold" instead, as some sorts of gourmet dishes, because this was the mindset: software was tech, tech was rare, tangible economy on the opposite was solid and granted and going well, so cash flowed, and no one would imagine you could one day spend more on a (necessary) kg of bread than on a game (minor comfort/luxury good plus art item)
but you thought sensible to spend the equivalent of 20 bucks or more for two new levels...

So you knew little.

Sure, if I'm on the fence about a game, a sale can convince me to try something out that I would not normally have. But from my point of view, if a developer gets 30 cents per unit sold, we're buying her a coffee, not financing her next game.

In that sense, the industry works as Valve intended. 80% discounts aren't suddenly great for the game industry just because GOG reliably attempts to step into Steam's huge footsteps. :(

After long consideration, it doesn't sound familiar at all. And the situation isn't at all comparable either.

First of all, we don't have too many gaming systems. We basically have three consoles and the PC - that's not at all comparable to the dozen we had back in 1983. And, mind you, this exact balance of consoles we've now had for, what, 20 years now? That sounds like a pretty stable situation to me. For comparison, back then the game industry rose and fell within just six (!) years from 1977 to 1983. This was an industry that grew wayyyy too fast and fucked itself by spectacular and sweeping miscalculations.

Games did not get cheaper and cheaper in 1983 like they do today. Games cost between 20 and 30$. Adjusted for inflation, that's literally the 60 to 90$ you pay for a AAA game today.

As to the quality of those games, again, this was a wholly different industry back then. Usually games were thrown together in a matter of weeks or even days by a single programmer. If these dudes had had a higher budget, they wouldn't even know what to do with it. And they wouldn't have been affected by a "budget cut" either. The cost of making a game in 1983 was basically the cost of production of physical goods plus marketing. Many cover artists have labored longer over the acrylic painting that was on the cover of those games than it took the programmer to throw the game together.

If you pay a 1983 programmer 1,500 bucks to make a shitty Atari game, that won't let the game industry crash.

But if you manufacture 700,000 module units of that shitty Atari game for two or three dollar a piece, and nobody is buying that shitty Atari game, that's the hilarious crash worthy miscalculation. ;)

So, as a child of the 80s, back then in possession of an Atari 2600 (until my brother disassembled it, like he disassembled our NES, incessantly mumbling "kalte Lötstellen, kalte Lötstellen"), I don't think the comparison gets us anywhere.

Today, making games is the cost of producing the actual digital content of the game, back then, it was the cost of producing physical game modules and marketing. Quite often today, no physical version of the game is produced and sometimes there's no marketing at all, at least for indie games. So the industry has changed 100% in structure and budgeting!

I'm getting to the Kickstarter stuff in a separate post. Let's not loose this one first. ;)

I'm often thankful that in the heyday of the Kickstarter revolution, I didn't own a credit card. I did back a few projects ("paypal option") and I received some wonderful goodies. One of the games I backed, total, was never finished. I jumped off one project a year after pledging because the developer gave an interview to a nazi (amazing how easily you can get a full refund when the employees of a a public figurehead know that he done goofed up majorly). In one case, two years after pledging 115€, I got a DVD in a cheapo slipcover that I never bothered to open; but the game itself brought me two dozen online friends and we're still having a lively Discord chat and streaming sessions on the weekend, so those 115 bucks were very well spent.

So, yes, hijinks all over. ;)

But ... the game culture surrounding these Kickstarters wasn't all bad. Mostly because GOG's hey- and paydays were often tied to those Kickstarters. One of the first questions asked of developers in the comments was "is there a DRM free option", and you could always see the pledges plummet when the developer answered with "no" or "not yet".

This was, practically, a contract between gamers and the developer, the only really valid one. We finance your game, you publish DRM free outside of the monopoly. We have few such "contract" type dealings with developers today, and I think that's one of the things that gets GOG less games each year. Less developers commit to DRM free exe installers because this fascinating preliminary phase of developer-customer negotiation isn't taking place. That's sad!

Damn, now I wish Return to Monkey Island would have been a Kickstarter.

Well, I don't know where you (or your parents) bought your games...but if you, like my family, and many others at that time (when dedicated computershops weren't a thing yet (definitely not in small towns and/or rural towns)) ordered your games out of the Quelle, Otto, or Neckermann catalogues, you definitely encountered quite a lot of games that appeared like official Atari 2600 games, at first sight...yet turned out to be cheap copies, made in Taiwan, etc.

Back then, official Atari 2600 games cost you between DM 39,- (which was definitely the cheapest end of the offers) to DM 169,- (in general - some have been even higher priced)...whereas the cheap copies (illegal, of course - yet officially sold through the mail order giants) only cost between DM 19,95 to DM 39,-
And some you could get even cheaper, advertised as "special offer!"

That makes quite a difference.
And I'm pretty sure you could find these copies in the US and other countries, too (sold through other channels, of course).

And of course, these copies were never as high quality as the originals.
So, yeah - the games got cheaper,
therefore they sold better,
therefore they reached a broader audience,
which then was disappointed over the bad quality of the games,
which resulted in videogames getting a bad reputation,
which resulted in less and less games sold
- crash.

And mind you: I'm not saying the "big corporations" didn't do their part in that development.

When H.S. Warshaw got the order to create E.T. (aka: the video game every ners ever calls "the worst video game of all times" - even those who never played it), he got only five (5) weeks time, because Atari wanted the game to be on the store shelves in time for the X-mas business.
That that wasn't to the advantage for the quality is out of the question.

That - due to the massive success of E.T. at the box office - they produced a whopping 5 million cartridges - despite that mediocre quality of the game (which the big wigs must have been aware of), was pure hubris ("hey, it's a big name, Spielberg is involved, ffs, this shit will sell like hot cakes!")

So we had: a huge box office success, which set high expectations, and led to a video game of the same name, which got sold in the millions,...and which turned out to be a huge disappointment for most - that's what I call "the stuff failures are made of".

And back then, people could return their games if they didn't like them...that's why there were so many E.T. cartridges buried in the desert.

Let's not forget that the percentage of society that bought games in the 80s to early 90s, was extremely miniscule compared to later 90s, and especially now.

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We are in an interesting dichotomy now, where rushing a game to market before the technology is superseded is no longer as important as it was, and perhaps not really important at all now.

GOG, then later Steam etc have proved the point that older games are still worthwhile for gamers to purchase, and because they are now just a digital download, the overheads are no longer really there, like they would be for a physical re-release. In fact, many games are now made in the style of older games, and many older games are getting remakes etc.

DEVs and PUBs of games have a huge market to sell to now.

Everything gets a certain level of devaluation when mass market happens, but I'm not sure we can factually claim that games now have less value. Cost and value don't always equate.

As I wrote about in another thread, I question the notion that games are enjoyed more now than they used to be. That the money spent on them necessarily equates to greater pleasure overall. There are several aspects to games, including story and eye candy and longevity and replay value, realism, etc.

Some mostly older folk, seem to think many older games had more substance and better told story etc.

Prices back then weren't necessarily low for a brand new game, (I payed 140 DM for Quake and Wing Commander IV, 120 for History Line).

What we are missing today is a price decay for games. When boxes were still a thing, after a year the prices would fall. After 1-2 years you could get games often for less than 25% of the original price.
The second hand market was probably one of the main reasons for that.

Yes, these days we have discounts that are way higher, but a) usually not within the first two years and b) they come and go. Back then the prices stayed low. And then there were the collections.
I bought a 50 dos-games classics collection (including the rare Turrican II PC) for 20€.
After a while games became as good as worthless, they were on covers of magazines earning the published not more than 1€.

Since there is no way to re-sell games anymore, there is no pressure from the second hand market, games don't need to become cheaper in time.

Today you can sell an adventure for 5-10€, which 25 years ago cost less than that.
(who remembers these? https://www.der-burtchen.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Bestseller-Games-Cover.jpg)

I never bought that particular magazine, but sure: Cover CD-ROMs/DVDs were a thing.

Though, usually, the games on these CDs/DVDs were "at the end of their lifespan".
Meaning: you could probably find them in the bargain bins of a store, but not on the stores' shelves, anymore.

With the release "for free" on Magazine CDs/DVDs, the right holders made some money for a final time.

Times were different back then - games had a limited "shelf life".

Either you bought them, when they were available, or they were gone for good (apart from second hand market and piracy).
Not like today, where they are (or at least can be) basically available forever in their digital "download only" form.

Well, these particular magazines didn't just feature a game on the cover CD but were made especially for this game, containing nothing but game info (and ads of course).
This is how I got my first collection of LucasArts games. Within one year (I think) all was released in this format, starting with Zak MacKracken up to Sam & Max, including code wheels for MI or the pictograms for Indy4.

You said it right regarding the "shelf life". Games would not sell after a while and got dumped. First with lower prices, then being part of a collection and/or on a cover magazine.
That's gone mostly now. Prices stay high, causing sales to have more impact.
It rarely happens that the undiscounted price for a game gets lowered.

Oh, scathing replies should go back to YouTube and die there.

Except, that in time many became rarities and almost impossible to get. Quality when secondhand also became an issue.

So prices kept going up. The only relief in some cases, was re-releases as part of a collection or maybe some PC magazine nostalgia release. Later, GOG in many cases changed that, and then others like Steam followed suit ... and of course some were made available direct from some DEV website, occasionally for free.

Quite a bit has changed. Just look at the situation with demos. Back in the day they were prolific, and I have oodles of CDs and even some DVDs full of game demos and game extras (mods, levels, etc).

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Part of the problem we have with the Game Industry at the moment, certainly with the big players, is maximizing profit based on time. You see the same with movies and music. It is not so much about making a big profit anymore, as making a huge one.

Any half decent game is always going to sell if you make it available, and they will earn a tidy profit. So the likes of good quality Indie style games as being quite viable is assured. Kickstarter was one way to avoid the perils of financial support from the big end of town, but in a number of cases now that has been abused. The current situation is also helped by the fact that games are not so easily seen as outdated anymore, as it is almost anything goes. Hell, who would have thought even 15 years ago, that blocky looking pixelated games would become a thing, selling well.

A game just needs to be a good entertaining distraction that engages. Most gaming folk aren't looking for that masterpiece of epic proportions. Sure most of us applaud the amazing graphics and realism in state-of-the-art games, but they aren't required to have an enjoyable game, and certainly most of us don't want to pay the high costs for them either.

When you compare games based on price, it is quite fascinating what say $10 USD can get you these days. When you compare amount of data and hours of gameplay etc, sometimes you are comparing a simple 500 Mb game for instance, with a 50 Gb behemoth, with expansion packs and other DLC. Just incredible what you can take advantage of with some of the discounts out there at times.

You're talking about the second hand market. You are right, but that also means it did not hit the game itself, but certain editions of it. The original editions were only available for a certain time (now they don't exist at all). That's were - as you said - rereleases, the collections, the big boxes (Jedi Outcast including it's 3 predecessors) and third party rerelease like Green Pepper editions, Price Pyramid and so on, came in. They had to counter the second hand market in order to get their games sold. I bought the original version of Mafia 1 not even a year after release for 10$. All this is not necessary anymore.
Also I kept buying games from UK, since the market there was broken and games often cost about half of what they die in neighbor countries.
So who only cared about getting the game and not about the writings on the box, could save a lot.

Today we have no writings on our box, we don't have boxes. There are no certain editions to pay a lot for.